Left and right, united in disdain for Detroit

By WILLIAM KRISTOL, SYNDICATED COLUMNIST

Updated
10:00 pm PST, Monday, December 15, 2008

In 1953, the president of General Motors, Charles Wilson, was nominated by President Eisenhower to be secretary of defense. During his confirmation hearings, Wilson was asked if he'd be able, as defense secretary, to make decisions contrary to the interests of GM. He answered yes, but added that he couldn't imagine such a situation, because "for years I thought what was good for our country was good for General Motors, and vice versa."

It wasn't a ridiculous view. It was widely shared -- by big-business-loving Republicans and big-union-embracing Democrats, by big-car-driving suburbanites and big-tank-occupying soldiers.

Today, GM, Ford and Chrysler get no respect. Maybe they don't deserve much. Detroit has many sins to answer for, and it's been doing plenty of answering. But -- and I say this as someone who grew up in non-car-driving family in New York and who is the furthest thing from an auto aficionado -- there is a kind of undeserved disdain, even casual contempt, that seems to characterize the attitude of the political and media elites toward the American auto industry.

As Warren Brown, who writes about cars for The Washington Post, recently put it, "There is a feeling in this country -- apparent in the often condescending, dismissive way Detroit's automobile companies have been treated on Capitol Hill -- that people who work with their hands and the companies that employ them are inferior to those who work with their minds and plow profit from information. How else to explain the clearly disparate treatment given to companies such as Citigroup and General Motors?"

Now there are other ways to explain the disparate treatment of GM and Citigroup. Finance is different from manufacturing, and banks from auto companies. It may be that the case for a huge bank bailout was strong, and that the case for a more modest auto package is not. Still, it seems to me true that the financial big shots haven't been treated nearly as roughly in Congress or in the media as the auto executives, who have done nothing remotely as irresponsible as their Wall Street counterparts.

What's more, in their disdain for the American auto companies, the left and right wings of the establishment agree. Of course, the particular foci of criticism are different -- the left berates the auto companies' management, the right the United Automobile Workers. But even on the left, while Democratic politicians still try to look out for the interests of the UAW, there's not really that much sympathy for the workers. The ascendant environmentalists disdain (to say the least) the internal combustion engine and everyone associated with it. Most of today's limousine liberals are embarrassed by their political alliance with the workers who built those limousines.

Meanwhile, on the right, free-market analysts have explained that our regulatory scheme of fuel-efficiency standards is counterproductive. But despite the fact that the government is partly responsible for the Big Three's problems, the right hasn't really been stirred to enthusiastically promote a deregulatory agenda to help the auto companies. What excites it is mobilizing to oppose bailouts for unionized workers.

Last week, Senate Republicans picked a fight with the UAW on union pay scales -- despite the fact that it's the legacy benefits for retirees, not pay for current workers, that's really hurting Detroit, and despite the additional fact that, in any case, labor amounts to only about 10 percent of the cost of a car. But the Republicans were fighting Big Labor! They were standing firm against bailouts! Some of the same conservatives who (correctly, in my view) made the case for $700 billion for Wall Street pitched a fit over $14 billion in loans for the automakers.

So Senate Republicans chose to threaten to filibuster the House-passed legislation embodying the George Bush-Nancy Pelosi deal. The bill would have allowed President Bush to name a car czar, who could have begun to force concessions from all sides. It also would have averted for now a collapse of the auto industry, and shifted difficult decisions to the Obama administration.

Instead, Bush will now probably have to use the financial rescue funds to save GM -- instead of being able to draw from sums previously authorized for the green transformation of the auto industry, a fight he had won in the negotiations with Pelosi. And Senate Republicans now run the risk of being portrayed as Marie Antoinettes with Southern accents.

Whichever party can liberate itself from its well-worn rut to propose policies that help both American businesses and workers has a great opportunity. That party's leaders could begin by offering management and labor at the Big Three a little more sympathy, and heaping upon them a little less calumny. Where's Charles Wilson when we need him?